OngoingWorlds blog

News & articles about play-by-post games, for roleplayers & writers

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Interview with Mike Bullen, GM of Wizards Inc PBEM

Wizards Inc office building

Wizards Inc is about Wizards in a modern day office block

Many many role playing games are set in a fantasy world, each with their differences in how you use magic. Fantasy is a staple of Play-by-post games too, and it allows the member’s characters to live their lives in a rich and exciting world where the only limits are our own imaginations.

Mike Bullen has created his own play-by-post game where the characters are Wizards. What is most unusual is that instead of being set in a typical Dungeons and Dragons type world, this one is set in our own world. Wizards Inc is a game about some Wizards who work in an office block in England. They solve problems for clients using their magic, but try to keep their wizardry secret from normal people.

I’ve known Mike since he joined up for my Blue Dwarf play-by-post game, and is a fun writer. I’ve asked him a few questions about his Wizards Inc game.

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PBEM terminology: "Post"

I wanted to do an article explaining the basic terminology used in a PBEM/PBP game, as it might not always be clear. This article starts right from the basics with the word:

Post

A post is an item of the story that a member submits. A post will continue the story that has been told so far, usually from the point of view of the character of the member who has written the post.

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Interview with Anthony Keen from the Star Trek Freedom PBEM

Star Trek Freedom

Star Trek Freedom

Star Trek PBEM games on the web

Star Trek makes up a vast amount of PBEM games, mainly due massive scifi universe in which it is set, giving the chance to have an unlimited number of possibilities for different starships, and an infinite amount of locations your characters can explore.

Star Trek Freedom

Star Trek Freedom , a network of PBEM games which all take place in the Star Trek universe.

There are many Star Trek PBEM games around, but Star Trek Freedom stands out for two reasons, it has a very detailed website (http://www.startrekfreedom.com) which is always kept up to date, and a strict training process before you’re even allowed to join a ship.

Star Trek Freedom has five ships, with an average of ten people onboard each. The ships make up the “52nd Fleet”

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You can now add character photos

The OngoingWorlds website has now been updated so that you can add photos to your character profiles. The photos will show when you view the individual character pages, as well as on the “Characters” page for each game.

All games have been upgraded, and any new games which are created will have this functionality as standard.

Add a photo for your character

To add a photo for your character, view the character’s profile, and click “Edit Character” (note: you can only edit characters that you own, or if you’re a Moderator in the game you can edit all characters in your game).

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Original PBEM games on OngoingWorlds

This blog was created initially so that I could chart the progress of the creation of the OngoingWorlds website, with a few articles to help people out when creating their own PBEM games. Also I’ve used it to talk about new features, and how I should progress with creating certain features of the site – as I want to make sure I’m creating something that will be really useful for GMs.

But now as the website has launched, I’m going to use this blog to also report on the progress of the PBEM games that people have created on the website. So far there have been two major games created on the website, these are Wizards Inc, and Omega 7.

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Give your character some believable character traits

So you’re playing a PBEM/PBP game and you want your character to be as believable as possible. The reason why you want this is so that other members of the game will read your posts  and really feel like your character is a real person. They will also respect you as a writer.

womans facial expressions

Inventing some character traits will mean people can understand your character's personality

Other writers may use your character

There will also come a time when other characters will want to write about your character, this might be when they want their character to interact with your character, or perhaps someone is writing an *Action* post which involves your character, and it’s important that they easily get to grips with your character. It’s really handy for them to be able to assume how your character will talk, and how s/he will react to certain situations (or they might leave this part up to you). But if your character (lets call him “John”) has a French accent, is a vegetarian, and is really afraid of scissors, then it’s important for other members to know about these things so that when they mention your character they don’t mention John going to the butchers on his way to the hairdressers.

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Should story posts be private?

Private sign

Some PBP/PBEM games can be set to private so that you can’t see their messages but what have they got to hide? There are some disadvantages of a private game

Edit: At the end of the post I say that OngoingWorlds doesn’t have a feature to make games private. This changed in September 2014 when private games were introduced

Play-by-email and play-by-post games have in the past been either private or public, and in this article we’re going to look at the advantages and disadvantages of each, and see why people might want their games to be public or private.

What is public or private?

Traditional play-by-email games (PBEM) were stories told by users who sent emails to each other, always keeping every member in the group cc’d into the email, or every member was part of a “newsgroup”, where emailing one email address distributed the email to all members of the group. Doing this meant that the posts that you sent to each other were only ever seen by other members of the group.

Games played on a public forum, or Yahoo groups are often public. This means they can be seen by anyone who has navigated to the website, and doesn’t have to be a member to view all posts in the story so far. In both forums and a Yahoo group, you have the option to make all posts private if you need to. This means that only members will be able to see the posts, retaining your privacy.

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Promoting the site

man crashing bike

This week the OngoingWorlds website kept crashing

Server Crashes

After going live two weeks ago, we’ve had a few problems with the web hosting this week which means that the site kept going down at certain times of the day. This caused a really nasty “Internal server error” screen replacing the lovely graphics of the website.

This has now been fixed and I haven’t noticed any errors since.

Promoting the site

This server downtime especially annoying this week as I’ve been working hard to promote the website as much as possible. I’ve added the website to some web-directories, as the more websites that point to us the better, this improves our ranking in Google. I’ve obviously made sure that I’m posting it in the correct places, as spamming forums would just have the opposite effect to our google ranking and might actually get OngoingWorlds blacklisted from Google!

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OngoingWorlds site Beta version is launched

The OngoingWorlds website has now gone into public Beta! This means that the site is on a live URL (not ongoingworlds/alpha as before), and is ready for people to start signing up and using it as it was intended, and not just testing.

How to use the site

Find games page on OngoingWorlds

This is the "Find Games" page on OngoingWorlds, if you create a game it will appear here.

I’ve tried to make OngoingWorlds as easy as possible to understand. If you want to create a new game click “Create Game” and if you want o find an existing game to join, click “Find Games”. You’ll be able to browse through all of the games that are currently available. Most of these currently listed are example games I’ve created for testing purposes, which you are welcome to join – but aren’t necessarily going anywhere! (unless you want to make it your own and continue the game on).

Click a game you like the look of, and you will see the game’s homepage, which will show you the full description of the game, as well as summaries of the four latest posts.

You can join a game by the “Click here to join” link on the left. This is where you will have to create a character profile for the character you want to play in the game. You will then have to wait for a moderator to review your character, and either approve you or deny you from joining the game.

Options for Game owners and Moderators

As a game owner, you can allow members to become moderators of your game, which means they can edit and delete posts, as well as approve users and also unsubscribe users.

The join-a-game page for OngoingWorlds

When joining a game youy must supply a character profile. The Moderator of the game decides what questions should be asked

As a moderator you can also have control over the fields on players character profiles. You can change the names of these fields so that you’re collecting information which is relevant to you and your game.At the moment this is basic, you’re able to have a maximum of 10 custom fields, which are all free text – but soon that should change to a much higher maximum number and allow different types of fields.

You can also set character groups, so for example a Star Trek game can group characters up into Departments like Command, Security, Medical etc.

Things to come

There are still a few major features which haven’t been included into the website yet, this is because they are still being worked on, and need some testing before they go live. The most important feature and one that I am most enthusiastic about is the character tagging, where you can tag a character in an post, so that you’ll be able to instantly see who is involved in this post by a series of thumbnails of the character’s photo down the right hand side. One of the reasons for this not working just yet is that you can’t actually upload an image for your character just yet. Uploading images is a security minefield, so I’m making sure I’m doing it the correct way before adding it as a feature.

Please give feedback!

There is a Contact Us page on the site, with a form to send a message directly to me. This site will improve greatly with your feedback, if you have any problems or suggestions please let me know about them.

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The "Membership Options" screen

the Membership options page

The "Membership Options" page for a game

I wanted to highlight the “Membership Options” page (see screenshot). Because I want some input on the options it presents to the member of a game.

In Ongoing Worlds, when you join an existing game, you can see all of the game posts, and will by default you will receive email notification every time there is a new post. For many users this will no doubt be annoying, especially if the game is really active and has many posts per day – meaning that your inbox will soon be overcrowded with emails from your game.

But on the other hand it could be extremely useful to know when someone has posted in your game, as you might not be checking back to the site very often to notice it. This means someone might post, and nobody will notice until they come back to the site.

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